"Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency
launched its warrant less-wiretapping program. "They violated the Constitution
setting it up," he says bluntly. "But they didn't care. They were going to do
it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When
they started violating the Constitution, I couldn't stay." Binney says Stellar
Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just
eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At
the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which
represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency's worldwide
intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney--who has
maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago--the taps
in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly
sophisticated software programs that conduct "deep packet inspection,"
examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second
cables at the speed of light.

The software, created by a company called Narus that's now
part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in
Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries,
and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in
email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the
million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or
recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says.
Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other
communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA's
recorders. "Anybody you want, route to a recorder," Binney says. "If your
number's in there? Routed and gets recorded." He adds, "The Narus device allows
you to take it all." And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected
will be routed there for storage and analysis.

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the
Stellar Wind program--again, never confirmed until now--was that the NSA gained
warrantless access to AT&T's vast trove of domestic and international
billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and
around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records
housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

Verizon was also part of
the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject
to the agency's domestic eavesdropping. "That multiplies the call rate by at
least a factor of five," he says. "So you're over a billion and a half calls a
day." (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not
comment on matters of national security.) [see]

An article by Steve
Sailer entitled "Does Israel Have a Backdoor to US Intelligence" discussed the
intimate involvement of Israeli-connected firms within the NSA surveillance
system and the possibility that such connections could be used to gather
intelligence on US citizens, firms or the US government by Israel itself.
Excerpts from that article follow:

The news last week that the US government had collected
Verizon's "metadata"
on who had called whom when and from where was widely seen as a stunning
revelation. Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post warned:

For example, having the calling
records of every member of Congress would likely reveal which members kept
mistresses, which could be used to blackmail members of Congress into
supporting a future president's agenda. Calling records could also provide
valuable political intelligence, such as how frequently members of Congress
were talking to various interest groups.

"in the world of business, a pattern
of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate
takeovers.

And yet informed observers have assumed for most of this
century that American telephone metadata may well already be available to a
foreign military-intelligence complex via hypothesized "backdoors" coded into
complex commercial software.

In December 2001, Fox News' chief political correspondent Carl
Cameron delivered a four-part
series on Israel's surveillance of American targets. For unexplained
reasons, Fox disappeared
Cameron's series down the memory hole later that month, although copies of the
episodes survive
on the Internet.

"It apparently hasn't hurt Israel that so many
Washington and Wall Street insiders assume that Israel knows their secrets."

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Cameron drew attention to Israel's strategic initiative
to dominate
communications software.
For example, Amdocs is "the
market leader in Telecommunication Billing Services." This firm is publicly
traded and registered in the tax haven of Guernsey.

Laurence A.Toenjes is retired from the University of Houston ?s Department of Sociology where he was a researcher with The Sociology of Education Research Group. Toenjes received his doctorate in economics from Southern Illinois University.